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PROFILES H-J
Hamilton Wende is an author and freelance journalist who has published six books, both fiction and non-fiction. They include two about his travels in Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan: True North: African Roads Less Travelled and Deadlines From the Edge. His two novels are The King's Shilling, about WWI in East Africa, and his latest, House of War, about a search for a lost city of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan. He has also written two books for younger readers: The Quagga's Secret and Msimangu's Words. When he is not writing he produces news and documentaries for CNN, ARD German TV and a number of other international networks. He lives in Johannesburg with his wife Lianne and his two step-children.
Harry Garuba is a poet, anthologist and scholar. He is author of the collection Shadow & Dream and Other Poems and has edited the hallmark anthology of new Nigerian poetry entitled Voices from the Fringe. An associate professor of English and African Studies at UCT, he is widely published in the field of African Literature and has held a Mellon fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin and a Mandela fellowship at the WEB DuBois Institute, Harvard. He is currently Director of the Centre for African Studies at UCT.
Journalist Heidi Holland has authored a number of books, including the internationally acclaimed Dinner With Mugabe. She writes a fortnightly column for Independent Newspapers.
Henrietta Rose-Innes is the author of a short story collection, Homing, and three novels: Shark's Egg, The Rock Alphabet and Nineveh(due out from Umuzi in August). She received the 2008 Caine Prize for African Writing and the 2007 HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award. Her short stories have appeared in Granta, AGNI and New Contrast magazines, and in various anthologies.
Hilary Biller is Food Editor of the Sunday Times.
Hugh Hodge is a Baby Boomer Brat. He was born in 1946 on Nelson Mandela’s 28th birthday (his closest brush with fame) at Tavistock in Devon, England. Rondebosch Boys’ High attempted to educate him without much success. Later, Essex University endured similar disappointments, but got over them. He has (had) three wives, and three children. Each marriage was happy in its own way and in its own time. The children are more beautiful than he expected. Hugh has had a job as a small, and sometimes negative, contributor to the technological revolution. Despite being commonly left-brained, and occasionally no-brained, Hugh writes poetry that is sometimes published. He attends the Off-the-Wall poetry gig Mondays in Obz, and hosts monthly gigs in Kalk Bay and Kommetjie. He edits New Contrast. And, aside from a natural tribal arrogance, he is kind and tolerant, even of dogs.
Ian Holding is a Zimbabwean schoolteacher based in Harare, where he continues to live, work and write. His critically acclaimed debut novel, Unfeeling, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2006, and his most recent novel Of Beasts and Beings poses the question: in a world where greed, barbarism, anarchy and lawlessness are rife, how do the honest survive? Is it possible to keep a conscience when all those around you have lost theirs?
Imraan Coovadia was born in Durban, educated at Yale and is now at UCT. He is the author of three novels – The Wedding, Green-Eyed Thieves and High Low In-between and has written for N+1, Threepenny Review, The Sunday Independent, The Hindu, Bombay Gin, Baobab, Boston Herald and Politikan.
Ivan Vladislavić, born in Pretoria in 1957, has lived in Johannesburg since the mid-seventies. He has published six books of fiction: Missing Persons, The Folly, Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories, The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View andthe recent Double Negative, published in a two-volume edition with photographer David Goldblatt’s TJ. (Flashback Hotel published in 2010 combines Missing Persons and Propaganda by Monuments).The non-fiction Portrait With Keys is a chain of lyrical texts about Johannesburg that can be read in different ways.Ivan’s work has won the Olive Schreiner Prize, the CNA Award and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, and has been translated into several languages. As an editor, he has worked with many of SA’s major writers.
Jacques Pauw is an award-winning journalist, author and television documentary producer. In the late eighties he was a founder member and assistant editor of the anti-apartheid Afrikaans newspaper Vrye Weekblad where he exposed death squads. He was a founding member of the SABC’s Truth Commission Special Report and head of Special Assignment, the SABC’s premier current affairs show. He has produced and directed television documentaries all over Africa and has extensively covered the genocide in Rwanda and civil wars in DRC Congo, Liberia and Algeria. Jacques has been named as South Africa’s Journalist of the Year and was twice CNN’s African Journalist of the Year. He’s received the Young African Leadership Award, the Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting, Italy’s Ilaria Alpi, The Media Institute of Southern Africa’s Award for Investigative Journalism and the Nat Nakasa Award for bravery and integrity in journalism. He is the author of four books and is currently working on his fifth.
James Clelland was born in Scotland, but has lived most of his adult life in Johannesburg, having emigrated here in 1982 as a research biochemist. He is a Doctor of Biochemistry and has published a wide variety of scientific articles in international journals. James has been writing most of his adult life and has published about a dozen short stories in various UK literary magazines. One short story won a prize in a Scots language competition, while two were published in UK Arts Council Anthologies. Writing continued in South Africa, as a writer for Woman’s Forum, fiction reviewer for the Rand Daily Mail, and short story writer for Springbok radio. He became a citizen of South Africa in 1992.
Jane Katjavivi (Undisciplined Heart – Modjaji Publishers) lives in Windhoek and has had a rich and interesting life. She was born and raised in England and met her Namibian husband before Namibian independence, while working with him for SWAPO. She has since become a naturalised Namibian and writes of her life in Windhoek, her close women friends and her experiences in the Namibian and African book world. She also had her own independent book shop in Windhoek and a publishing company. Her memoir is a beautifully written careful account of her life.
Janice Galloway is the Scottish author of seven books of prose and poetry. She was born in Ayrshire and worked there as a secondary schoolteacher for ten years. Her first novel, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, published in 1990, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel, Scottish First Book and Aer Lingus Awards, and won the MIND/Allan Lane Book of the Year. Her second, Blood, shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and her second novel, Foreign Parts, won the McVitie’s Prize in 1994. That same year, and for all three books, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters E.M Forster Award. Monster, Janice’s opera with composer, Sally Beamish, explored the life of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, and was premiered by Scottish Opera in 2002. Her third novel, Clara, based on the life of pianist Clara Schumann, published the same year, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Award, won the Saltire Book of the Year 2002 and was a New York Times Notable Book 2003. Her Creative Scotland Award (2002) led to Rosengarten, a meditation on the subject of obstetric implements and the science of birth with sculptor Anne Bevan. Her latest book, This is Not About Me, was published in September 2008 and a second volume of “anti-memoir” is due for publication later this year.
Jassy Mackenzie was inspired to write her first novel, Random Violence, after getting hijacked at gunpoint in her own driveway. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and published in the USA where it received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. Her second novel, My Brother’s Keeper was a finalist in the International Thriller Awards. Her third, Stolen Lives, is the sequel to Random Violence and has also been published in the USA. Jassy lives in Kyalami with her partner Dion, where she is at work on her fourth book. When she is not writing, she works as the editor of a hair and beauty magazine and the full-time assistant to three cats.
Jean-Pierre Rossouw is the editor of Rossouw’s Restaurants, the leading independent guide to eating out in South Africa, now in its eighth edition. In addition to being an authority on the food scene, Rossouw has been a wine columnist for the Cape Times newspaper for over a decade, and was also the wine writer for BestLife magazine and a contributor to international titles. His free-wheeling take on the Cape Winelands,
Tasting the Cape, was published by Penguin in 2010.Jenny Crwys-Williams is an author, critic, journalist and broadcaster from Johannesburg whose literary credentials remain unparalleled in South Africa. Her reputation as one of South Africa’s most influential book reviewers has given her access to years of exclusive interviews with authors, both on air and at her signature events. She loves talk radio and during her time behind the mic has also interviewed leading personalities ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Oprah and the Clintons to film stars Meryl Streep, Peter O’Toole and Helen Mirren, and broadcaster David Frost. Her very successful book club Jenny & Co features different experiences with recently published authors and has a membership of over 3 000. Her own books include several editions of The Penguin Dictionary of South African Quotations and In the Words of Nelson Mandela.
Jenny Hobbs is a journalist, novelist, former book reviewer, TV presenter and scriptwriter of a series of book programmes, mother and grandmother. She is now the Director of the Franschhoek Literary Festival, which she helped to initiate and run as part of a small team of co-volunteers for its first four years, with the aim of bringing together a broad cross-section of South African writers and raising funds for a new community library in Franschhoek. She has published four non-fiction books and five novels – the latest is Kitchen Boy (Umuzi) – but suspects that her eventual claim to fame will be as the creator of Blossom, the Bez Valley chick whose outpourings for seven years in the Seventies were the first regular columns in South African English.
Jeremy Boraine started his career in publishing in New York at Penguin Books as an editorial assistant in a science fiction imprint. Upon his return to South Africa he worked in newspapers and then returned to book publishing at Maskew Miller Longman. He has been publisher at New Africa Books and Penguin Books SA and is now the Publishing Director at Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Jeremy Nell
Journalist and Cape Talkbroadcaster John Maytham writes: I was brought up in a remote part of rural Eastern Cape. The nearest town was Alice – an hour’s drive on the back of a Ford van over very bumpy roads. But it was a journey I looked forward to once a week because the Alice library was waiting at journey’s end. It was only the library that mollified the hell of being an urban sophisticate trapped in a rural child’s barefoot body. It was books that allowed me to dream of a life that wasn’t dominated by conversations about the price of land or the prospects for this year’s avocado crop or whether Sergeant Herselman cheated at the Saturday afternoon gatherings of the Middledrift tennis club. And through boarding school, many years of largely useless university study, ten years of a desultory acting career, and two decades as a journalist, it has been books, books and more books that have made a dull life more interesting.John van Zyl, a Free State Rhodes Scholar, was Head of Media Studies at Wits from 1976 to 1996. His special field of interest is the use of media in education and development. During that time he had a parallel career as a media writer and critic. His long-running column John van Zyl on the Box earning him a Pringle Prize in 1983. Between 1984 and 1989 he was also Southern African Director of the French Cinema Direct community filmmaking programme and was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academique for this work in 1989. In 1996 he and his wife Charlotte helped establish Classic FM. He then started ABC Ulwazi, a NGO that specializes in training community radio workers and producing radio programmes for community radio. In 2006 he and Charlotte settled in Franschhoek and he started Franschhoek FM, a local community radio station.
Jonathan Jansen is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Free State (since 2009) and former Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria (2001-2007). He began his working life as a high school Biology teacher, having received his undergraduate education at UWC, his teaching credentials at UNISA and his postgraduate education in the USA (MS, Cornell; PhD, Stanford). His most recent books are Knowledge in the Blood, which was selected by the Library Journal in the USA for the list of Best Books of 2009, and he has co-authored Diversity High: Class, Color, Character and Culture in a South African High School (University Press of America). He holds Honorary Doctorates in Education awarded by the University of Edinburgh and Cleveland State University. He is the current President of the South African Institute of Race Relations, and was recently Elected Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the Academy of Science for the Developing World.
Jonny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of five books, two of which, Midlands and The Number won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Three-Letter Plague was a Washington Post Book of the Year and won the Recht Malan Prize. His latest book, Little Liberia, tells the story of Liberia's civil war from the perspective of two exiles living in New York. Steinberg was educated at Wits and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is currently at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (Huma) at UCT and is working on a book about fear and governance in South Africa's past and present.
Jonty (C J) Driver is South African by ancestry, birth, upbringing and most of his education (St Andrew’s, Grahamstown, and UCT). President of the NUSAS in 1963 and 1964, he was detained in 1964, then went to England. Deprived of a passport by the South African authorities, he was stateless for five years before becoming a British citizen. He has published five novels, six books of poetry, and a biography, as well as a number of ‘essays in biography’. His first four novels (Elegy for a Revolutionary, Send War in Our Time, O Lord, Death of Fathers and A Messiah of the Last Days) have recently been re-issued by Faber Finds. He is honorary senior lecturer in the School of Literature and Creative Writing of the University of East Anglia and was a judge for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2007 and 2008.
Julian de Wette was born in Cape Town and attended South Peninsula High School. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, he worked for the United Nations for over 20 years in the USA, the UK, Namibia, Switzerland, Germany and Kazakhstan. De Wette’s most recent work, a novel, A Case of Knives, was published by Umuzi, Random House Struik in May 2010. He has also published three collections of Afrikaans poetry: Die Koning in die Buiteland in 1976; Verban:Verbinne in 1982; Tussen Duine Gebore in 2002. His poems and short stories have appeared in Poetry Australia, New Contrast, Observations (NY) and the anthology, Somehow We Survive (NY). A number of his Afrikaans poems have been published in South African, Dutch and Belgian anthologies.
Justice Malala is one of South Africa's most respected political commentators and journalists. A former newspaper editor, he is currently a media consultant and is the resident political analyst for independent television channel e.tv. He holds a BA in Politics and English from the UNISA and numerous journalism diplomas. He was trained at the Independent School of Journalism and has been published in local and international newspapers. His media company, SesaMedia, is based in Johannesburg.
Justin CartwrightJustin Cartwright was born in South Africa and educated in the USA and at Oxford. His novels include In Every Face I Meet (shortlisted for the Booker); The Promise of Happiness (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize); White Lightning (shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award), Masai Dreaming, winner of the MNet Prize, and the 1999 Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers. His new novel, Other People’s Money, has been highly acclaimed. He lives in London with his wife.
